On
Charlie Chaplin

Henri Lefebvre

It
is not Chaplin’s clowning contortions and funny faces that
make people burst out laughing. From his very first films, he stood out
from such other film comedians as Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd. The
secret of his comic powers lies not in his body, but in the relation of
this body to something else: a social relation with the material world
and the social world. Naïve, physically adept but spiritually
innocent, Chaplin arrives in a complicated and sophisticated universe
of people and things with fixed patterns of behaviour (where people
behave like things—and in conjunction with things). The
clown’s physical suppleness, and his concomitant ability to
adapt himself and his gestures with an almost animal rapidity, become
humanized as they give way to an extreme awkwardness which both proves
and signifies his naïvety. However, this awkwardness is never
permanent; the original situation is reinstated; the clown has his
revenge, he defeats the hostile objects—and the hostile
people—only to fall back into momentary disarray. Hence
visually comic moments when he cannot adapt are followed by moments of
victory when he can, and this stops the
‘mime‑audience’ relationship from breaking down,
producing fresh gusts of laughter and assuring that the humour never
becomes awkward or embarrassing. Like pleasure, like harmony in music,
laughter is stimulated by a series of resolved tensions, in which
moments of relaxation are followed by even higher tensions.

The
point of departure for the ‘vis comica’ peculiar to
Chaplin is therefore the simplicity of a child, a primitive and a
wonderfully gifted barbarian, suddenly plunged (as we all are at every
moment) into an everyday life that is inflexible and bristling with
ever‑new difficulties, some foreseeable, others not. In his first films
Chaplin takes up battle—a duel which is always different and
yet always the same—with objects, everyday objects: an
umbrella, a deckchair, a motorbike, a banana skin ... Always surprised,
always delighted by the strangeness and richness of things, always
awkward when faced with ritualized practices (essential behaviour,
necessary conditioning), Chaplin captures our own attitude towards
these trivial things, and before our very eyes. He makes it appear
suddenly amazing, dramatic and joyful. He comes as a stranger into the
familiar world, he wends his way through it, not without wreaking
joyful damage. Suddenly he disorientates us, but only to show us what
we are when faced with objects; and these objects become suddenly
alien, the familiar is no longer familiar (as for example when we
arrive in a hotel room, or a furnished house, and trip over the
furniture, and struggle to get the coffee grinder to work). But via
this deviation through disorientation and strangeness, Chaplin
reconciles us on a higher level, with ourselves, with things and with
the humanized world of things.

Thus
the essence of this humour is not to be found in pity, nor even in
strangeness (alienation)) but on the contrary in a triumph which is
forever being renewed and forever threatened. The dog, the pretty girl,
the child, are not cinematic props, but elements necessary to the more
or less complete final victory.

Therefore
Chaplin’s first films may be seen as offering a critique of
everyday life, a critique in action, a basically optimistic critique,
with everyday life: a critique in action, a basically optimistic
critique, with the living, human unity of its two faces, the negative
and the positive. Hence its ‘success’.

In
Chaplin’ feature films, the critique becomes broader, taking
on a higher meaning. They confront the established (bourgeois) world
and its vain attempts to complete itself and close itself off, not with
another world but with a type.
This type (a down‑and‑out) is the emanation of that other world, its
expression, its internal necessity) its essence externalized and yet
still internal (to put it abstractly and speculatively, which after all
is how Marx expressed his discovery of the proletariat as a class).

As
necessarily as it produces machines and men‑machines, the bourgeois
world produces deviants. It produces the Tramp, its reverse
image. The relation between the
Tramp and the bourgeois order is different to the relation
‘proletariat­-bourgeoisie’. In particular
it is more immediate, more physical, relying less on concepts and
demands than on images.

By
its false and illusory and euphoric and presumptuous insistence upon
the self, the ‘free world’ immediately creates its
pure negative image. Thus the Tramp­-figure contains certain
characteristics of the image Marx presents of the proletariat in his
philosophical writings: the pure alienation of man and the human which
is revealed as being more deeply human than the things it
negates—negativity forced by its essence to destroy the
society to which at one and the same time it belongs and does not
belong. And yet the ‘positivity’ of the
proletariat, its historic mission, is not accomplished on the
philosophical or aesthetic level; it is accomplished politically, and
philosophical criticism becomes political criticism and action ... In
the type and the 'myth' presented by Chaplin, criticism is not
separable from the physical image immediately present on the screen. If
therefore it remains limited, it is nevertheless directly accessible to
the masses; it does not lead to revolutionary action or political
consciousness, and yet it uses laughter to stir up the masses
profoundly. Thus in his best films Chaplin's humour takes on an epic
dimension which comes from this deep meaning. ‘The image of
alienated man, he reveals alienation by dishonouring it.’

Here
for the first time we encounter a complex problem, both aesthetic and
ethical, that of the reverse
image: an image of everyday
reality, taken in its totality or as a fragment, reflecting that
reality in all its depth through
people, ideas and things which
are apparently quite different from everyday experience, and therefore
exceptional, deviant, abnormal.

The
type created by Chaplin achieves universality by means of extremely
precise elements: the hat, the walking stick and the trousers, all
taken from London’s petty bourgeoisie. The transition from
the mime to the Type marks a date and an expansion in
Chaplin’s work, an expansion within the work itself and one
made possible by that work alone; suddenly he puts his own previously
constructed figure (or image) at the centre of his films. In a very
strong sense, he puts himself on the stage; as a result, a new
development takes place.

Thus
the critique of everyday life takes the form of a living, dialectical
pair: on the one hand, ‘modern times’ (with
everything they entail: bourgeoisie, capitalism, techniques and
technicity, etc.), and on the other, the Tramp. The relation between
them is not a simple one. In a fiction truer than reality as it is
immediately given, they go on producing and destroying one another
ceaselessly. In this way the comical produces the tragic, the tragic
destroys the comical, and vice versa; cruelty is never absent from the
clowning; the setting for the clowning is constantly being broadened:
the city, the factory, Fascism, capitalist society in its entirety. But
is the comedy defined by its underlying tragedy, or by its victory over
the tragic? It is in the spectator personally that Charlie Chaplin
constantly manages to unite these two ever‑present and conflicting
aspects, the tragic and the comical; laughter always manages to break
through; and like the laughter of Rabelais, Swift and
Molière (i.e. the laughter of their readers or audiences) it
denies, destroys, liberates. Suffering itself is denied, and this
denial is put on display. In this fictitious negation we reach the
limits of art. On leaving the darkness of the cinema, we rediscover the
same world as before, it closes round us again. And yet the comic event
has taken place, and we feel decontaminated, returned to normality,
purified somehow, and stronger.

To
sum up, our analysis has seen Chaplin as a type
rather than a myth,
based on general characteristics (poor but full of
vitality—weak but strong—ruthlessly seeking money,
work, prestige, but also love and happiness). How can an image which so
directly reveals what is significant about the so‑called
‘modern man’ be called mythical?

In
any case the interesting thing here is not a discussion of the Chaplin
‘myth’ and the mythical character of the image of
life he presents; it is the very fact that an image with its roots deep
in everyday life can be seen as mythical
and that the word
‘myth’ can be used to describe it.